California employment case index

Luis Betanco delivered Living Spaces furniture from the retailer's California distribution centers to California customers and never crossed a state line. In a published decision filed June 25, 2026, the First District held he is still a 'transportation worker' exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act, because he was actively engaged in the interstate transportation of goods even though he made retail — not wholesale — deliveries. The furniture was inevitably destined from the outset of its interstate journey to his customers, so it never left the interstate stream even though it paused in a California warehouse. Because the FAA does not reach a section 1-exempt worker, Labor Code section 229 kept his statutory wage claims in court, and his representative PAGA claims survived under Adolph v. Uber Technologies. The order was affirmed.

A PAGA plaintiff proved Labor Code violations but recovered about one percent of the $56 million maximum he calculated, and his attorney fees were cut by a 0.70 negative multiplier. The Fourth District affirms: section 2699(e)(2) mandates no method for reducing penalties — per-employee is fine — and the trial court adequately justified the fee multiplier, leaving the “heightened scrutiny” question for the Supreme Court.

Marshalls moved to compel arbitration of the individual component of a single-count PAGA action under a 2014 arbitration agreement, relying on Viking River. Division Four affirmed the denial on pure contract grounds: the parties would have had to be clairvoyant to anticipate a distinction the Supreme Court would not draw for another eight years. The court expressly declined to enter the headless-PAGA dispute, and the authoring justice wrote separately at length questioning whether Viking River's federally imposed claim-splitting rule is constitutionally sound.

Lauren Brown filed the fifth of five overlapping PAGA actions against the same restaurant operator. While her case sat stayed, the employer settled globally with an earlier plaintiff, and the trial court then granted judgment on the pleadings. Division Eight affirmed. The only contested question it reached was whether the settling plaintiff's failure to wait the full 65 days after her amended agency notice destroyed the settlement's preclusive effect – and the court held it did not, because nothing extends the waiting period to amended notices and the agency itself had accepted the settlement. Brown also lacked standing for violations postdating her 2018 separation.

Taking the walls off harassment law raises a harder question than the one it answers: if the conduct need not happen at work, what still has to connect it to this plaintiff? California answers with a nexus requirement, and the authorities disagree less than practitioners think. Fisher spoke of presence; Beyda read Fisher as requiring a nexus and held that awareness suffices; Carranza let a $4 million verdict stand on a photograph the plaintiff never saw circulate; and Kruitbosch held that where the harasser’s conduct is not work related, the employer’s response to the complaint can create a hostile environment all by itself. This is the companion to our analysis of the Okonowsky locus rule.

An LAPD captain never witnessed officers passing around a fake nude photo of her and was never confronted to her face — yet the Second District affirmed a $4 million FEHA verdict, holding that her secondhand knowledge of the department-wide circulation, and the LAPD’s refusal to stop it, supplied substantial evidence of a severe or pervasive hostile work environment. A leading application of Government Code section 12923.

Billy Ford's 2018 arbitration agreement carved out representative claims under PAGA. After Viking River split PAGA claims into individual and non-individual halves, his employer argued the word representative had become ambiguous and that the FAA should resolve the ambiguity toward arbitration. The Third District affirmed the denial of the motion to compel, holding the clause unambiguous: because the contract was formed when settled California law forbade splitting a PAGA claim at all, the carve-out excludes every PAGA claim. Viking River changed the law of divisibility, not the principle that nobody arbitrates what they never agreed to arbitrate – a clean rule of construction for a very large installed base of legacy agreements.

Overlapping PAGA actions against one employer are now routine, and so is the race to settle. Turrieta v. Lyft decided what the losing racer may do about it: nothing. A non-settling plaintiff suing as the state's deputy on identical claims has no authority to intervene in the settling plaintiff's action, to require the court to hear objections, or to move to vacate the judgment — and Moniz v. Adecco (2025) holds that recasting the asserted stake as personal rather than sovereign changes none of it. What survives is not a voice in the first case but a defence in the second. Under Arias a PAGA judgment does bind non-party aggrieved employees; under LaCour v. Marshalls that preclusion must be proved, and a release reaching past the settling plaintiff's own agency authority binds her alone. The practical consequence is that the leverage has moved to the LWDA notice letter, which now measures what a PAGA plaintiff can ever release.

After Turrieta v. Lyft disapproved Moniz II by name, the objector in the long-running Adecco PAGA settlement tried a new key for the same lock: she was asserting her own personal interests — a penalty share, fees, a service award — not the state’s. Division Four dismissed her appeals. Every interest she claimed arises from PAGA itself and is derivative of the state’s; relabeling it personal is a semantic exercise that would leave Turrieta’s holding with no effect. The first published application of Turrieta makes overlapping-settlement fights a before-judgment affair: object in the approving court, police preclusion scope under LaCour — but intervention, vacatur, and appeal are closed.

Does every PAGA action contain an individual claim an employer can compel to arbitration? The split the California Supreme Court will resolve.

Reversing summary judgment for United Airlines, the Court of Appeal held that whether three male employees with comparable social-media accounts were "similarly situated" comparators was a question for the jury, applied the continuing violation doctrine and section 12923's low bar to the harassment claim, and found a two-week complaint-to-termination gap sufficient for retaliation causation.

Two Highland Hospital workers sued the public hospital authority running Alameda County’s medical facilities for meal-and-rest violations, unpaid wages, and PAGA penalties. A unanimous Supreme Court ended the case at the definitions: Labor Code section 18’s “person” — the term that controls who is an “employer” under the wage order and who can be penalized under PAGA — affirmatively excludes public entities. Absent express words bringing the government in, break rules and PAGA penalties stop at the public-sector line. The court disapproved Sargent’s contrary rule for statutes carrying their own penalties, declined to decide whether Government Code section 818 independently bars such penalties, and reserved the effect of the 2024 PAGA reform.

Three Lyft drivers filed overlapping PAGA actions; when one settled, the other two moved to intervene, objected, and moved to vacate the judgment — invoking their status as deputized proxies of the state. A divided Supreme Court held a PAGA plaintiff’s deputization confers no such rights: the statute delegates the power to commence and prosecute one’s own action, and it entrusts settlement oversight to the LWDA and the approving court. Moniz v. Adecco is disapproved. What remains for rival plaintiffs is coordination, informal input to the approving court, and advocacy to the LWDA — plus the open questions the court expressly reserved, including the state’s own rights and personal-interest intervention.

Harassment no longer happens in a place. A private Instagram account about a specific prison, a group chat, a warehouse saturated with misogynistic music — the dominant fact pattern in harassment intake now begins outside the premises. Okonowsky v. Garland rejects the notion that only conduct inside the physical workplace can be actionable and substitutes a test of effect plus employer response; Sharp v. S&S Activewear disposes of the targeting and equal-opportunity-harasser objections. This analysis sets out what the Ninth Circuit actually held, what it conspicuously did not, and why FEHA reaches the same question through a different instrument.

Between Viking River in June 2022 and Adolph in July 2023, federal courts across California dismissed the non-individual half of PAGA cases for want of standing, on the United States Supreme Court's reading of California law. In Johnson the Ninth Circuit says what to do about those dismissals while the case is still on appeal: affirm the order compelling arbitration of the individual PAGA claim, vacate the dismissal of the non-individual claims – not because the district court erred, but because the California Supreme Court has since corrected the state-law premise – and remand so the district court can apply Adolph. The panel also rejected the argument that Adolph cannot be reconciled with Viking River. Judge Lee concurred to flag what he called a lurking tension between Adolph's bifurcation procedure and the Federal Arbitration Act: if an arbitrator's findings in a low-stakes individual arbitration can bind in a high-stakes representative action, the economics of arbitration change. He saw no irreconcilable conflict on these facts, and explained why – which is also a map of how the argument will be made next time.

Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills, Inc. (2024) 15 Cal.5th 582 holds that trial courts lack inherent authority to strike a PAGA claim as unmanageable, even if it is complex or time-intensive. Manageability is a class-action requirement that does not apply to PAGA; complexity must be handled through ordinary case-management tools, not dismissal.

For three years the first move in every large PAGA defence was a motion to strike the claim as unmanageable. Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills ended that unanimously, and ended it structurally: the Supreme Court did not weigh the policy and come out against, it found that no California court had ever possessed such a power and declined to create one. The question since is what remains, and the answer is more than defendants expected and less than they wanted. Evidence limits, scope limits, witness control, consolidation and ordinary merits rulings all survive untouched, and in 2024 the Legislature put the first two into Labor Code section 2699, subdivision (p) in almost the court's own words — while pointedly leaving out the dismissal power. The word manageability appears nowhere in the statute. What is left open is narrow: a due-process authority of last resort that Estrada reserved and no published decision has yet defined.

Marshalls bought a sweeping PAGA release in a federal settlement whose plaintiff had noticed only one theory to the LWDA — off-the-clock time in end-of-shift bag checks. When Robert LaCour later sued over expense reimbursement and other never-noticed violations, the trial court struck his claims as precluded. Division Four reversed: a PAGA judgment’s preclusive reach is measured by the claims the settling plaintiff pleaded or was authorized by her LWDA notice to plead, not by the words of her release, and an unauthorized proxy is in privity with no one. The court also upheld pandemic Emergency Rule 9, and it reserved issue preclusion while barring any double recovery.

Adolph v. Uber Technologies, Inc. (2023) 14 Cal.5th 1104 holds that a PAGA plaintiff whose individual claims are compelled to arbitration retains standing as an “aggrieved employee” to litigate the non-individual representative claims in court — California’s answer to the standing question left open by Viking River.

Kindercare’s arbitration agreement contained a “poison pill”: a clause providing that the whole agreement is invalid if its class/representative-action waiver is unenforceable. Because a wholesale predispute waiver of representative PAGA claims cannot be enforced after Iskanian and Viking River, the Court of Appeal held the poison pill voided the entire agreement — sending every claim, including the employee’s individual claims, to court. Had Kindercare omitted the poison pill, Viking River would have let it compel the individual claims; its own drafting foreclosed that path. The drafter was held to the all-or-nothing clause it wrote.

The FAA preempts Iskanian to the extent it bars division of a PAGA action and prevents arbitration of an employee’s individual PAGA claim; an employer may compel the individual PAGA claim to arbitration. (The Supreme Court further opined that, under its reading of California law, the plaintiff would then lack standing…

Settling and dismissing individual Labor Code claims does not strip an employee of standing to pursue a PAGA claim. PAGA standing depends on being an “aggrieved employee” — someone employed by the alleged violator against whom one or more Labor Code violations were committed — not on maintaining an unredressed…

The unpaid-wages component of section 558 is not a civil penalty recoverable through PAGA; only the fixed civil penalties ($50/$100 per employee per pay period) are PAGA penalties. Because the unpaid wages are not part of the PAGA claim, the trial court could not compel that portion to arbitration as if it were.

Government Code section 12923 is the most consequential development in California harassment law in twenty years, and it is routinely read for more than it says. It declares that a single incident of harassing conduct is sufficient to create a triable issue, that harassment cases are rarely appropriate for summary judgment, and that one Ninth Circuit decision may not be used as a severity yardstick. What it does not do is repeal the severe-or-pervasive element or amend the operative prohibition. This analysis reads the section subdivision by subdivision against the federal case law it addresses, and sets out precisely what survives.

A PAGA plaintiff is presumptively entitled to discover the identities and contact information of other aggrieved employees statewide, subject to the employees’ privacy interests (which may be protected through a Belaire-West opt-out notice) rather than to a heightened threshold showing of merit before discovery.

Iskanian v. CLS Transportation (2014) 59 Cal.4th 348 holds that class-action waivers in employment arbitration agreements are enforceable after Concepcion (abrogating Gentry), but a predispute waiver of a representative PAGA action is contrary to public policy and not preempted by the FAA, because a PAGA claim belongs to the state.

Two unions took assignments from more than 150 transportation workers and sued their employers under the UCL and PAGA for meal- and rest-break violations. The Supreme Court unanimously shut the door: after Proposition 64, an assignment cannot confer UCL standing on an uninjured assignee, and a PAGA claim cannot be assigned at all — the act creates no property right, so the aggrieved employee, suing as the state’s proxy, ‘does not own an assignable interest.’ Associational standing does not fill the gap, and representative UCL claims must proceed as class actions per the same-day companion, Arias. The state-proxy architecture announced here is the foundation Iskanian, Kim v. Reins, Adolph, and Turrieta all build on — and the 2024 reform kept its line intact.

Arias v. Superior Court (2009) 46 Cal.4th 969 holds that a representative PAGA action for civil penalties need not satisfy class-action requirements, while a representative UCL claim for the same Labor Code violations must — and that a non-class PAGA action does not violate the employer’s due-process rights.

The Fourth District affirmed a whistleblower-retaliation verdict for an Office on Aging director fired after warning that a County reorganization was unlawful — holding the County waived its exhaustion defense by first raising it after trial — while reversing her sexual-harassment claim under the pre-§ 12923 "severe or pervasive" standard and affirming a remittitur-backed new trial order on damages.

The failure-to-prevent claim is pleaded in nearly every FEHA complaint and is the one FEHA claim that cannot stand alone. Government Code section 12940, subdivision (k) states the employer's preventive duty without any predicate condition, yet since Trujillo v. North County Transit Dist. the private claim has been derivative: a jury that finds no actionable discrimination, harassment or retaliation leaves nothing for the claim to rest on, and after Dickson v. Burke Williams harassing conduct that is not severe or pervasive will not serve. This analysis traces how the predicate rule was built, marks where it stops — it limits the private right of action rather than agency enforcement, it leaves the individual-defendant question open, and it survives section 12923 untouched — and sets out the symmetry practitioners miss most often: the same statutory duty whose breach grounds the plaintiff's claim supplies the first element of the employer's avoidable-consequences defence.